>> Friday, August 20, 2010

>> Tuesday, August 17, 2010

A Quote made by Philips Media HQ: "I will just footnote this as I was thinking about Sony. I made CDi presentations to the chairman and president of Sony, Ogha, and Idea (who recently stepped down) and we wanted desperately for Sony to enter the market. They had a great portable unit and we tested all of our titles on it in our LA product test center. But Sony never really got behind the format. Philips was alone. I even made trips to Matshushita who had a Panasonic branded machine they featured in some exhibitions (I can remember going to the Flower and Garden show in Tokyo and seeing CDi players that was lab units, from Kycocera too, the manufacturer of the original 3 stack 180 player)
So in the end, with Philips going at this effort alone, no other hardare support to speak of and the ill fated US marketing both software and hardware, and an inappropriate mix of titles. (Philips could have succeed far more - even if they just concentrated on making this a kiddie machine), but the lack of focus and resolve and politics doomed it to be a failure in America, despite a lot of very hard work by some."

>> Friday, August 13, 2010

Have you tried the MESS CD-i driver yet? Some say it works better than CD-i Emulator, others say CD-i Emulator 0.52 excells. For example, on trying to emulate CD-i using MESS, running Link Faces of Evil and Zelda's Adventure, the overall is better than CD-i emulator, but it shows a lot of freezings on a lot of other games. The MESS CD-i author sais about it: "Your best bet at this time is to shell out the money for CD-i Emu. The current CD-i driver in MESS is held together with glue and toothpicks. It can run a number of simpler commercial games, but it falls right over on pretty much anything major." Some (but probably not all) of the issues will be resolved once the internal roms for the CDIC and SLAVE MCUs are decapped and dumped. But who knows when that will happen: The MESS CD-i project is pretty much silent. We at Interactive Dreams hope that the upcoming CD-i Emulator 0.53 will show a definitive better CD-i emulation including a start at Digital Video on CD-i.

"As far I know this one was never officialy released and was only for internal use. This CD-i disc comes from a retired product manager of Philips in The Netherlands an therefore Authentic. I took over a lot of them. Most of them are (very) rare. Sometimes even unique."
Does anyone know what this it?

If you can find a copy of this title for your CD-i player you should definately pick it up: It's a strange title focussed on nylons and it tells you a lot about it. The interesting part of this title is the city it creates where you can wander through at night, walking inside buildings you see here and there are different things to do: Talkings, videos, small minigames, documentation, history, all about nylons. It's a unique style I only found in Surf City and Richard Scarry's children CD-i's: Only now for adults. The content is rated 18+ so you can imagine what to find here even more.

>> Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Quick status update about CD-i Emulator 0.53: CD-i Fan had some problems with upgrading his PC because Visual Studio 6 has problems working under Windows 7. His older CD-i Emulator development builds didn't even work under Windows 7. With the new Visual Studio 2010, he could try building CD-i Emulator again! Read the full article at his CD-i Bits Blog. CD-i Fan: "After finding the single source line that generated the 300+ errors I got on the first build, it appears that I now again have a working development build of the most recent CD-i Emulator, optimistically labeled v0.5.3-beta1. It seems to run like a charm, doing 50/50 frames on non-FMV titles and even 34/50 on my FMV test cases. Wow!

Using Visual Studio 2010 means that the minimum system requirement is now Windows XP, as earlier Windows versions are no longer supported as C++ build targets. But I don't think that should really be a problem.

At the end of next month it will be five years since the original CD-i Emulator v0.5.2 public release; I'm hoping to release 0.5.3-beta1 before that."

CD-i Emulator 0.52 was released September 29, 2005, which was the first and still only public release.
[Thanks, CD-i Fan]

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Welcome to the wonderful world of Interactive Dreams. You've just come to a warmhearted place all dedicated to the Philips CD-i. With attention to detail and quality, 2015 should see the rise of CD-i as a Retrogaming platform. For many CD-i has gone as a relative obscurity had it not been for the intervention of websites like The Black Moon Project and Interactive Dreams. Hopefully we're doing our bit to set the record straight along with all the other great CD-i projects.

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